Maintenance operations related to system assets are assisted through the use of maintenance software applications. The applications typically monitor asset health for a broad range of system assets, such as assets used in process control, assets that implement home or commercial security, assets related to commercial vehicles, or assets that provide access control based on security privileges of various personnel. The applications typically function in coordination with various platforms, such as industrial process control platforms used to implement a control strategy on field devices or other production line components. Maintenance applications of this type typically enable personnel tasked with asset management, such as maintenance supervisors, to view asset-related information and to determine as well as execute a maintenance plan based on the viewed information.
These types of maintenance applications typically require configuring the application by organizing information related to managed assets as structured data, capable of being presented to the application and being displayed to maintenance personnel as a hierarchical tree of system assets. Configuration is typically required in order to properly enable the application to effectively monitor the maintenance status of thousands of assets. Unfortunately, configuration of this type also requires either a strong dependency on a particular system data structure or significant, replicated work.
Many parts of the system being monitored by the application, notably intelligent devices like transmitters and valve positioners in the case of an industrial process control system, are capable of detecting irregular or noteworthy conditions and reporting these conditions to the platform as “events”. Unfortunately, current maintenance software applications are not capable of interacting with assets that have not been conventionally configured. Furthermore, current maintenance software applications require conventional configuration in order to interpret “event data” received from assets, such as asset-specific conditions reported to the maintenance software as alarms, or alerts. As a necessary consequence, current maintenance software applications also require configuration in order to provide asset documentation services, such as historical records of conditions or reports detailing current conditions associated with an asset.